Re: [Evolution] Importing from KMail -- Lost Messages

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

please see http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html

"Stricter parsing of the ``From '' separator line doesn't help either,
because there are many, many variations on what goes in that line (since
it was never standardized either); and also, some mail readers include
that line verbatim when forwarding messages (Sun's MailTool, for
example) so a stricter parser wouldn't help that case at all, because
message bodies tend to contain valid matches."

later on the page describes why you can't unmunge ">From" lines as well.

Jeff

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 00:28 -0500, Garry Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 11:44 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 21:10 -0500, Garry Williams wrote: 
> > > On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:10 -0500, Rob Matlack wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > > but the same symptoms were produced
> > > in my case because some of my messages had lines in them that matched
> > > this regular expression:
> > >
> > >     ^[Ff]rom[[:space:]]
>
> [snip]
>
> > Hmm, no, it definitely must be capitalised.  I can't see how you could
> > see it matching against non capitalised words.  It uses a memcmp to
> > look for the "From " line.
>
> I just did a test and you are right.  My memory is faulty.  It takes a
> capitalized ^From to trigger the break.
>
> (By the way, I forgot to mention that the experience I described is with
> Evolution 2.0.1 on Mandrake 10.1.)
>
> [snip]
>
> > Ahh well, that isn't berkeley mailbox format then.  That's something
> > similar but different.  Rather like sunos' mailbox format which also
> > uses/honours the content-length header.
> >
> > I had no idea mutt did such a thing, it is a pity, since it is a poor
> > convention to use.
>
> I also notice a Lines: header in mutt's messages.  I guess it uses both
> a belt and suspenders.  :-)
>
> Anyway, it might help to change the import test to also check for a mail
> address after the ^From and some number of white spaces.  Of course,
> that opens a whole new can of worms because recognizing a syntactically
> valid E-mail address is non-trivial -- even if it omits comments.  
>
> The third "field" in a ^From separator is a time stamp.  I've seen a few
> different variations of their formats, depending on the client that
> created it.  Still, recognizing a time stamp should be easier than an
> E-mail address.
>
> Maybe a different change would be to, in the presence of Content-Length:
> or Lines:, ignore ^From when it occurs too soon.